O'Neil: What we still don't know about sexual harassment

Participants march against sexual assault and harassment at the #MeToo March in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles﻿ in November. ﻿

Photo: Damian Dovarganes, STF

As a woman, I've been thoroughly outraged by the pervasive sexual assault and harassment that the #MeToo movement has exposed.

As a data scientist, I've been intrigued.

It's a monumental case of missing data. Awful as they are, the reported incidents tell us little about the underlying prevalence of sexual harassment. There's no reason to think we've uncovered even half of it. Judging from what we've seen so far, our starting assumption - what statisticians call a Bayesian prior - should probably be that it's happening everywhere. Or, if that sounds too strong, everywhere there's a serious power dynamic, high stakes decisions, and powerful men - or mostly men - who feel untouchable.

One urgent task is figuring out what cultural conditions allow victims to speak out. In what business, social or cultural environments are we most likely to be seeing what's really going on, and where can we only infer?

Answering that question requires us to understand why people haven't spoken out earlier. This clearly involves the repercussions that victims have faced after coming forward. They vary from the nuisance of being defined by something that happened to you rather than something you've accomplished, to being doubted and ignored, to losing your job and ability to care for your family, to being shunned and shamed by your community.

Those impediments offer ample reason to doubt that just because we're not hearing about sexual assault in a given environment, it isn't happening. For poor women supporting their families, for example, the risks of speaking out are often too great. Consider hotel workers. Reports of abuse are rare: We heard about it only when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was involved. But the union of hotel workers recently managed to insist on panic buttons for its members. That likely means the problem is ubiquitous.

What about finance? We haven't heard much about sexual harassment there, although an executive from Visa was recently pushed out. Is it because egregious cases are settled with non-disclosure agreements? Again, no news isn't good news, and silence eventually becomes a signal in itself. A payoff with an NDA might seem better than nothing, but society suffers when fancy lawyers get people to sign away their rights to talk about what's happened. If victims can be effectively silenced, there's no reason to think that the rate of abuse will decline.

Some people have pointed out that more politicians have been called out on the left than on the right. Does that mean Democrats are more likely to be sexual harassers? Hardly. It's entirely likely that the costs of speaking out - and of being believed - are higher in a more conservative environment.

Rupert Murdoch demonstrated this recently when he dismissed the multiple Fox News scandals of the past couple of years. (He used the term "nonsense," which Fox News has since sought to clarify.)

In other words, there's a ton of missing data, and it isn't equally distributed. It's more likely to be lacking when women are poor, or when the stakes are high, or when the lawyers are very well paid. Even so, I'd wager that we'll soon have enough information to get a sense of which industries and cultures are making steps toward improvement. Ironically, it will be the places where we see the most allegations that should give us the most hope.

O'Neil is a mathematician who has worked as a professor, hedge-fund analyst and data scientist. She founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, and is the author of "Weapons of Math Destruction." (c) 2017, Bloomberg View